Three New Faculty Join the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering

February 02, 2012 —

Three new faculty arrived at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering in January 2012.

Mahta Moghaddam joins us as Professor from her previous position as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she had been since 2003. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in electrical and computer engineering. She has been active for more than 20 years in the remote sensing community, and has introduced a number of innovative approaches for quantitative interpretation of synthetic aperture radar imagery. She is and has been the principal and co-investigator on numerous research projects and has authored or co-authored more than 200 journal and conference papers, earning many honors and awards, including the University of Michigan Faculty Recognition Award in 2011. She also has served in a number of editorial roles in prominent IEEE journals, and has chaired and co-chaired numerous workshops and conference sessions. She is a Fellow of IEEE, and leads a vibrant research group of graduate students and post-docs that will join her at USC.

Wei Wu joins us as Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering after several years as senior scientist in the nano-electronics research group at HP Labs. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 2003. His research is in nanoimprint technology and its applications to novel devices such as crossbar memory (i.e., memristor), and optical meta-materials. His work on nanoimprint lithography has enabled the development of many nano-electronic and nano-photonic applications and devices, has been commercialized via IP licensing. Dr. Wu is author or co-author of 65 peer reviewed journal papers and more than 60 conference presentations, including 10 keynote and invited presentations. He has 49 granted US patents and 77 pending applications. He served as HP's representative at the SEMATECH lithography program advisory group, and also on the executive committee of IEEE San Francisco Bay Area Nanotechnology Council.

Ben Reichardt comes to USC as Assistant Professor following three years on the faculty of the School of Computer Science and Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He received the B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University in 2001, and the Ph.D. in computer science, University of California, Berkeley in 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Quantum Information, California Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2008. His research is in quantum algorithms, fault-tolerant quantum computation, quantum information theory, geometry of minimal surfaces, and cryptanalysis. He is known for contributions to the field of fault-tolerant quantum computation, a development suggesting that scalable quantum computation may be possible with only modest improvement in the precision of existing quantum operations. He has also made important contributions to adiabatic quantum optimization - a novel paradigm introduced in 2001 for designing quantum algorithms for NP-complete problems, and the basis for the D-Wave quantum computer now installed at USC.